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They Start Singing

by LARA MILLS

The problem with staying up late in Jakarta is that Java doesn't follow a night owl's schedule: the mosques start singing around 4 a.m. as people begin their days often before I've ended mine. If you fall sleep at two and the morning prayer starts at the end of your first dream cycle, it will lift you out of sleep like being fished. You will curse and slam your phone when you check what terrible hour you were taken out of a dream, feeling tomorrow's morning preemptively destroyed by exhaustion. You go back to sleep to save tomorrow’s afternoon, but the afternoon is taken out too by the following prayer call at six which jolts you at another critical point of sleep. You fall back into dreaming, picturing masses of people waking up as if on cue, and this new dream compounds your powerlessness at getting the sleep your body needs more than water when your internal clock is hours different from everyone else in your immediate world.

Alarm goes off at eight.

I am jealous, jealous of morning birds. No one recognizes that the world accomodates early risers while the rest of us are too tired to notice. They affix the stigma of diet and sex to our night orientation and grant honor to being the first ones awake, yet never consider what it might take for them to sleep like us, to stay up until sunrise without substance or vice. I agree that everyone should experience the sun rise and reflect on the eternal passage of days, in the glorious moments of twilight when the sun and moon and stars are finally soft enough to meet each other, but I regret that only night owls get to experience how dawn is a daily moment which can be approached from two directions. 

My favorite city in the world is Jogjakarta, Indonesia, and my favorite place in Jogja is alone on a bridge over any of its rivulet valleys, listening to the call to prayer at either dawn or dusk. I feel this moment at sunset if I leave the city's main roads during my commute home and stop my motorbike on the bridge near my house, or I feel it at sunrise when I'm coming back from a friend’s house or a bar or club, and am trying to get home to sleep before the next day’s full sun becomes too disorienting. Especially at either side of sunrise, on my way home from wherever and inevitably alone, a rosier light than usual highlights the city's terracotta rooftops stretching up from the rivulets. When you’re still awake, the prayer calls layered over these beautiful sleepy rooftops will remind you that you're seeing a different end of the day than most people in your adopted city, and the moment becomes secret and exhilarating since you watched it begin and it belongs to you alone.

I feel guilty in Jogja though when I pass the traditional market near Tugu monument after morning prayer, seeing all the market workers shuffle to their stalls and talk together in quiet but gradually waking voices, rested and starting a day I'm still denying. I'm inevitably in my night clothes from the bar or the club and have probably just smoked a pack of clove cigarettes and condensed several beers into a few stretched hours of nongkrong hangouts that living in Indonesia is so amazing for. I pass the market on my motorbike and wonder how much my bare arms and shoulders or knees stick out at the next traffic light while stopped among a crowd of Indonesians wearing jackets and veils and gloves to protect themselves against the coming sun and the wind. I worry whether the cigarette stench off my nighttime clothes is leaving a trail for them to drive through in my wake, whether my hair will still smell like clove smoke when I go to work in a few hours, giving me away as the foreigner I am in any morning bird's world.

I live in Jakarta now and the infamous stranglehold of the city's traffic is in place every day from around 6-9am, and 4-7 p.m., the exact times of daily transition I was always free to revere in Jogja. Being productive at anything here takes twice as much effort and people often leave home at the 6 a.m. prayer to eat breakfast in the office kitchen rather than spend those same hours in rush hour traffic. Adjusting to this is proving impossible for me. I hate sleeping knowing that the purpose of nighttime hours here is simply to rest in order to fight traffic, which could be avoided just as easily by sleeping through rush hour instead of trying to stay ahead of it. I then feel guilty again for the luxury of my Jakarta life that I have a job I can do any time of day and can afford to live close enough to work to avoid a worse commute. I try to sleep and wake up at the same time as everyone else out of misguided solidarity, but my sleep in Jakarta is disturbed twice every morning by the prayers I used to rejoice at still being awake enough to hear. I arrive at work desperately sleep deprived yet at least three hours after everyone else has started their day, and when I enter my office through the side door, I am aware that keeping such a conventionally lazy schedule means that all my mornings appear to have started without a struggle.

 In Jakarta there is still one time of day when my schedule matches the attention demanded by the calls to prayer, at sunset if I'm home from work and have the time to sit on my rooftop and smoke the night’s first clove in peace. I hear the drone of sunset prayer rise up one by one from the neighborhood's dozen or so mosques and it calls me to my own prayer, the type treasured by the godless: silence to honor the passage of time, and gratitude for feeling sufficiently alive and happy to appreciate the calm of such a moment, to let it become my own transparent peace. The prayer at this time of day, maghrib, means to me that the day is finally passing into night which is my time to excel, my temporal home, feeling like the day itself by ceding to inevitable transition, but remembering always to honor its passage too.

Lara Mills is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Jakarta. You can find her website here. She last wrote in these pages about Ariel.

Photos and video by the author.

"Autumn Wake" - Early Day Miners (mp3)